TICKETS: $5 for CIR members in advance, $7 at the door. $7 for nonmembers in advance, $10 at the door. Tickets available here.

Her book will be available for sale, and Dr. Kleinfeld will sign them following the talk. There will be a cash bar throughout the discussion.

An urgent and provocative look at how extreme violence can cripple democracies, including our own, and how they can regain security.

The most violent places in the world today are not at war. They are buckling under a maelstrom of gangs, organized crime, political conflict, and state brutality. More people have died in Mexico in recent years than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Such devastating violence can feel hopeless. Yet multiple places once suffused with bloodshed have since recovered.

In this powerfully argued and essential book, Rachel Kleinfeld examines why some democracies are so violent, and provides an ultimately optimistic assessment of how others have reclaimed security. Drawing on fifteen years of study and firsthand field research—interviewing generals, former guerrillas, activists, politicians, mobsters, and law enforcement in countries around the world—Kleinfeld tells the stories of societies that successfully fought massive violence. She then offers penetrating conclusions about what must be done to build governments that protect all their people.

Taking on existing literature and popular theories on war, crime, and foreign intervention, A Savage Order is a blistering yet inspiring investigation into what makes some countries peaceful and others war zones, and what we can do about it.​

Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld

Dr. Rachel Kleinfeldis a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she focuses on issues of rule of law, security, and governance in post-conflict countries, fragile states, and states in transition.

As the founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project, she spent nearly a decade leading a movement of national security, political, and military leaders working to promote people and policies that strengthen security, stability, rights, and human dignity in America and around the world. In 2011, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton appointed Kleinfeld to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board, which advises the secretary of state quarterly, a role she served through 2014.

Kleinfeld has consulted on rule of law reform for the World Bank, the European Union, the OECD, the Open Society Institute, and other institutions, and has briefed multiple government agencies in the United States and abroad. She is the author of Advancing the Rule of Law Abroad: Next Generation Reform (Carnegie, 2012), which was chosen by Foreign Affairs magazine as one of the best foreign policy books of 2012. Her writings have appeared in Relocating the Rule of Law (Hart, 2009), Promoting Democracy and the Rule of Law: American and European Strategies (Palgrave, 2009), The Future of Human Rights (Philadelphia UP, 2008), Promoting the Rule of Law: The Problem of Knowledge (Carnegie Endowment, 2006), With All Our Might (Rowen and Littlefield, 2006) and other publications. She has also co-authored Let There Be Light: Electrifying the Developing World with Markets and Distributed Generation (Truman Institute, 2012).

“This is a brilliant analysis of societies that appear to be intractably violent, but in fact are not—including our own. A Savage Order is original, penetrating, and filled with gripping history and reporting.”—Steven Pinker

“A Savage Order gives us a comprehensive survey of countries that have overcome extreme violence and shows how there is a common thread to their recoveries, one that could be of tremendous help to countries currently in the grip of deadly violence. Rachel Kleinfeld’s analysis is both analytically rigorous and accessible, and will be required reading for those players and policymakers who are actually trying to deal with such terrible problems today.”—Francis Fukuyama